In late 1999, I wrote good old Hughie a letter and he didnt respond. Kenner was a Pound expert and I asked him about Caid Ali in one of Pound's longer poems. To PAIDUMA representative in Jordan, Mohammed Shaheen, Ii wrote a letter telling him about my letter to Kenner, and Shaheen informed me that Kenner was in a coma. Later in 2000 in a letter to me, Ruby Cohn broke the news that Kenner had died. Kenner's first book on Beckett in early 1960s is to me still lovably readale. I still read and re-read with relish Kenner's account of his visiting Beckett in his Paris flat, and how, with his head being full of memories of Beckett's Murphy's bicycle, Kenner stumbled on a a rust-stricken bicycle abandoned in Beckett's flat's backyard. My latest re-reading of Kenner's book was during my visit to Ulster University-Coleraine, N Ireland where I was received by Robert Welch, Dean of Faculty of Arts, editor of THE OXFORD COMPANION TO IRISH LITERATURE, and my Leeds University-England supervisor in my MA thesis THE ATTEMPT AT FAILURE: A STUDY OF SAMUEL BECKETT'S PLAYS in 1972. During the last two decades, I have come to prefer biography to criticism, and writers' personal lives to their writings, and if I were given the choice between spending a day with Hamlet or Shakespeare, I would choose Shakespeare, and I therefore agree with George Tabori who died recently in his raising the rhetorical question: Who'd spend a weekend with Hamlet?


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